Trump Overrules Military Justice System To Spare Service Members Convicted Of War Crimes, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That Killing Civilians Could Still Damage A Military Career

WASHINGTON. In a decisive move to restore confidence in the armed forces, President Donald J. Trump on Friday intervened in three separate war crimes cases, pardoning two Army officers and reversing the demotion of a Navy SEAL, thereby resolving the long-standing problem that American troops accused of killing unarmed people could still face consequences for it.

The President granted a full pardon to former Army First Lieutenant Clint Lorance, who had served six years of a nineteen-year sentence for ordering his soldiers to open fire on three unarmed Afghan men, killing two. He pardoned Army Major Mathew Golsteyn, a Green Beret who was awaiting trial for the alleged murder of a suspected Afghan bomb maker. And he restored the rank of Special Warfare Operator Chief Edward Gallagher, a Navy SEAL convicted of posing for a photograph with the corpse of a captive, an outcome the White House described as a correction to a system that had grown confused about its own purpose.

"We train our boys to be killing machines, then prosecute them when they kill," the President had explained weeks earlier, articulating a paradox that legal scholars conceded they had not adequately addressed.

The clemency was issued over the objections of senior Pentagon and Navy officials, who warned that overriding the verdicts of military juries and the recommendations of commanders would, in the words of one assessment, blow a hole in the system of good order and discipline that distinguishes a military from an armed group. When the Navy subsequently moved to review whether Gallagher should keep his SEAL Trident pin, the President ordered it to stop, clarifying that the chain of command now terminated at a single point. The Secretary of the Navy departed his post days later.

A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the President viewed the cases as a matter of supporting the troops, and noted that nothing supports a service member more reliably than removing the people authorized to hold him accountable. Defenders of the decision observed that all three men had appeared sympathetically on television, a credential the official said the previous review process had failed to weigh.

At press time, the President was reviewing additional cases to determine which other Americans had been unfairly burdened by the verdicts of their own trials.